


Prepared

by Potboy



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen, for both of them, it's really a father son thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-10
Updated: 2016-08-10
Packaged: 2018-08-07 22:52:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7732930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Potboy/pseuds/Potboy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When facing inevitable execution by immensely powerful darkside Force Users, Armitage Hux likes to remember the important life lessons he was taught by his father.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prepared

Taj's father loved him very much. For example, when he was five years old, Taj's father had allowed him to go with him on a trip to their homeworld's main orbital space station. Then, when Taj was pressed to the nearest viewport, little hands spread wide and mouth dropped in awe at the sight of Arkansis like a tiny pearl beneath him, his father had slipped into the crowd, left him there and gone home.

To this day the dawning realization of abandonment recurs to him vividly in dreams. Even awake, sometimes he'll feel again the abject screaming terror of being lost in a place he didn't understand, with no money, no help, unable even to remember what continent he came from, let alone his address. Rejected. Unwanted. Alone.

Looking back, he can see his father's thoughtfulness at work. Truthfully, it hadn't been that hard a test. The families of cadets were coming through all the time. It should have been easy to look for a uniform he recognised. Easy to tag along and claim that he was lost, say his father would pay for his ticket once he arrived. In hindsight, he would have had to be unforgivably stupid not to be able to work it out. Yet at the time he had been blinded with tears, shaky with desolation – in a freefall of panic and misery that made it all but impossible to think.

It had been like the world breaking and falling out from beneath his feet. He has not known a moment of feeling safe, ever since.

And that was the lesson, of course. Taught in a way that could never be forgotten or denied. “It isn't a matter of _if_ your allies will betray you,” his father had told him solemnly when he stumbled back. “It is a matter of _when_. You cannot rely on anyone but yourself. You should have been prepared.”

Armitage has been a disappointment to his father most of his life, but he has never needed to be taught the same lesson twice.

When Starkiller Base literally fell out from under his feet, he felt only a stab of confirmation of something he already knew. There was no safety in the universe. One had to be ready.

He was fortunate indeed to have had a father who loved him enough to teach him this early. This and other things.

“This is goodbye,” says Ren, as they stand in the Finalizer's hologram chamber, waiting for the Supreme Leader to appear. Ren's face isn't healed enough to be jammed into a helmet, so it's on show, raw and a little pathetic in its openness. He's all but begging for sympathy even while he's making threats.

“Is he going to kill me himself, or is he going to get you to do it?” Hux asks, and yes, he's scared – he'd have to be a moron not to be – but at least he's not showing it like Ren. At least he's not an open wound the galaxy displays in order for passersby to prod at it, like Ren.

Ren flinches away, surly as if he thinks he's been falsely accused. “I meant I will be taking the shuttle down to the Supreme Leader's world. I have no idea what he intends for you.”

Snoke's world. A greyish-brown planetoid around a dying star. Hux viewed it from the bridge before he came to his judgement, fine-tuning the Finalizer's orbit while the sense of being five years old again drove a vibroblade of fear beneath his ribs. He didn't panic this time. He can be proud of that.

A hum from the chamber's machinery and suddenly Snoke is with them. Normally, even Hux can feel his Force presence like an oceanic depth of dark water, as if he'd been plunged into an abyss where strange things swam. This time he feels nothing. Good. That's good. It's odd to look up at the creature without it and see something frail, something that has outlived its time. It's odd and intoxicating not to have to be so excruciatingly _careful_ for once about what he's thinking in its presence.

The shaking of his arms is more visible than it would be if he clasped his hands behind his back, but at the moment he needs both of them free.

“Supreme Leader,” he says, and his voice quavers despite himself. “Kylo Ren is recovered. I have brought him to you as I was ordered.”

His heartbeat is hissing in his ears. They are both stronger than him, and he is afraid, afraid, afraid. This never gets easier.

Snoke leans forward, his cloudy blue eyes locking onto Hux like targeting lasers. “Your mind is shielded from me, General.”

Beneath his jacket he wears a Force-suppressing collar, designed to cut a Jedi off from the Force. Intended as a restraint, he reasoned that if it cut _him_ off from the Force, it would serve as a protection instead. Frankly if the creature thought he would work for five years with Kylo Ren and not equip himself with whatever he needed for self-defence it didn't know him well at all, mind reading be damned.

“It is.”

“That is the act of a man with treacherous thoughts.”

There always was the possibility that his protections would be taken as provocation. Inevitable things cannot be regretted. “I hoped to gain enough time to argue for my life,” he said, still willing to hold it off a little longer, if Snoke will let him.

“You came here expecting to be killed?” The great alien puts on a fake-concerned look with Kylo, but with him it mostly seems amused. It toys with him because it knows he doesn't like it, and it knows he can't do anything about it.

“Yes. You won't kill Ren – there are not enough Force users around to waste one. Yet after the fall of Starkiller, an example must be made of someone, and here I am.”

“And here you are,” Snoke agreed, his smile pulling taut the sinews across his teeth. Is he rare too? The last of his kind? Possessor of power and wisdom beyond the dreams of mankind? Hux will say so, if he ever comes to tell this story.

“Yes, here you are with your mind guarded against me. You forget that I can reach across lightyears and turn you inside out with a thought.” Holding Hux's eyes, he reaches out a hand like a dark nebula and closes it.

The collar around Hux's throat arcs with flames like a solar flare. He screams and drops the dead man's switch he had been holding in his left hand, so he could clutch at the burning thing with his glove, lift it away from his skin.

Even as the switch falls, Finalizer's engine pitch scales into a shrieking howl, and the decks tremble as the ballistic cough of the ventral cannons fills the ship with the sound of glory. Hux laughs around the sear of his throat. It's not a Starkiller, but the Finalizer's cannons are powered by kyber crystals the size of a man's head. His beautiful battleship has armament enough to pulverise a wretched, petty asteroid like Snoke's homeworld and set the pieces alight.

The hologram of Snoke looks over its shoulder. A sense of something ominous rushing towards him out of the corner of the frame, and the projection snaps off. The metal in his hand is cool again and his mind is his own.

“What did you…?” Ren is still half drugged from medi-bay. He shouldn't be on his feet, but of course there had been no stopping him, and Hux had weighed his options and decided it would be more advantageous not to try.

Ren hasn't hit him yet. Hasn't powered on his laser sword – hasn't got his mind around this yet – and Hux is not going to stand there and wait until he does. He's off balance now, better keep him that way.

Smiling, he pushes himself into Ren's space, closing until he can feel the man breath, smell the burnt bone and gore smell of him. Ren's new cyborg hand closes like a vice on his hip, but then pauses as if Ren is lost for what to do next.

“I'm sorry, Ren. It was him or me. You see that?”

There are, unexpectedly, tears in the man's eyes, but he's shaking his head. “No. No, you _couldn't_. A man like you? A nothing – kill Snoke?  You _couldn't._ ”

Well, he'd been going to do this nicely. Brush back Ren's hair and kiss him, for old times sake. Now not so much. His right hand is already curved around Ren's throat, beneath his jaw, where he had once been in the habit of stroking. An ideal place to smack it forward, and drive the sedative filled needle through the leather of his glove, into Ren's jugular vein.

“You...” Ren gasped again, trying to pull the needle out with his fingers and the Force, both of them growing slipperier as he staggered backwards. He gave up, fumbled for his saber, the other arm outflung in a pulling gesture that Hux felt like scrabbling fingers on the half-burned out shield of his Force dampener. He warily edged out of the range of the sword, pulling his glove off, in case he might need to actually use his custom blaster. “You can't have killed him. I can't lose-- I can't lose them both. Not at once.”

“The planet is on fire,” Hux said, surprising himself with a wringing sensation in his stomach as he caught an echo of how Ren felt. “If Snoke tries to escape on a ship we will shoot it down. If he stays, we will take the place apart around him. You underestimate me, Ren. You always have.”

“Pen-pusher,” Ren slurred, visibly fighting the drug – falling to his knees only to roar back into action, then trip over himself again as his balance went, and his coordination with it.

H ux sighed, keeping well out of the way as he watched the fight be lost. “It's funny,” he observed, as he almost let himself believe he had won. “You know I'm a tactical genius, yet somehow it still surprises you when I'm three steps ahead.”

Taj's father had loved him very much. Two months after the space station trip, the Empire had fallen, and his father had been forced to decide what he loved enough to take with him, and what he had to leave behind to be destroyed by the Republic. He left his wife and his lover. He left his school and his experiments on Force-sensitive children. But he brought his son, he brought his research, and he carried on improving both until the day he died. The drug had been another gift, another thing to be grateful for, another way in which he had been prepared.

“I chose him,” Ren's knees had given out. He was sprawled rather decoratively on the chamber floor, his sabre rolled away from his hand and snapped into silence. “I was always going to have him.”

It was pathetic to watch, but something atrophied in him stirred faintly at the sight nevertheless. “They leave you, Ren” he suggested. “Fathers. If either one of them had loved you, they would have taught you that earlier. They would have given you the tools to stand on your own.”

The elbows were the next to go. Ren lay down like a big dog in front of a cold fire and closed his eyes. “Are you going to kill me?”

He dared to take a step closer and to hunker down, where he could reach out and push Ren's shoulder with the muzzle of his blaster, ready to startle away the moment he moved. But he didn't move.

“I should,” he whispered gently. The thought was a thrill. “But what a waste. You could still be an asset to the First Order, Ren. If you cared to be.”

“By which you mean to you?” Ren still had clarity enough to mock, though he now couldn't open his eyes.

“Of course.” Hux sat back on his heels and finally allowed himself to feel it. Victory. No more Force mysticism at the helm. From now on he would organize the universe his way. He would make his father proud.

A call to the bridge to make sure there was nothing left of Snoke. Another to engineering to activate the carbonite storage. He would freeze Ren for safekeeping and then ship him off to his mother. On awakening with the Resistance, either Ren would kill Organa, which would solve one of Hux's problems, or she would kill him, which would solve another and doubtlessly inflict a useful amount of psychological damage on herself.

Then Hux would contact his father's Commandant's Cadets – now an elite cadre of Force-sensitive officers in the First Order military, and let them know that their patron's son needed them. So if Ren did find his way back, there would be checks and balances in place to control him. No more letting him rampage about at random. The thought made him smile. He always could have made the Order work so much better. Now he would have the chance.

“But you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to cut you loose. I'm going to leave you to learn what it is to be alone. And then we'll see if you have what it takes to find your way home, Ren. If you do,” he indulged the wish to stroke back Ren's beautiful, heavy black hair, “I'm going to welcome you back with pride. But however you return to me, as enemy or ally, make no mistake. I will be prepared.”


End file.
